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Film Screening. Bimmer

Please join us for a screening of the film Bimmer (2003) as part of the opening night for the film series Putin's Russia: A 21st Century Film Mosaic at the Museum of the Moving Image. Introduced by Harriman faculty member Keith Gessen.

This story of four rough-hewn, unrepentant hustlers and their escalating adventures in a stolen BMW (bimmer, pronounced beemer, is slang for the car) became an out-of-nowhere cultural sensation in Russia and beyond, unearthing a new generation of filmmakers fed on 90s western genre films and formed by post-Soviet madness. Infectiously scored and expressionistically filmed, Bimmer is a darkly funny road trip through an immoral, socially arbitrary landscape, featuring four antiheroes who careen between profane nihilism and tribalist loyalty, and an ending that echoes The Wild Bunch in its cinematic spectacle and generational reckoning.

Keith Gessen is a founding editor of n+1 and a contributor to The New Yorker and The London Review of Books. He is the editor of three nonfiction books and the translator or co-translator, from Russian, of a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and a work of oral history. He is also the author of two novels, “All the Sad Young Literary Men,” and "A Terrible Country," which will be released on July 10, 2018 by Penguin Random House.

Yuri Shevchuk, Lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages, apepared on the English broadcast division of Hromadske Radio (Ukraine’s Public Radio) to discuss contemporary Ukrainian filmmaking. You can read the transcript and listen to the show here.

Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University for a presentation by Volodymyr Kulyk, Head Research Fellow at the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University for a presentation by Sergei Zhuk, Professor of Russian and Eastern European History at Ball State University, of his book Soviet Americana: The Cultural History of Russian and Ukrainian Americanists (I.B. Tauris, 2018).

The Harriman Institute and the Russian American Cultural Center (RACC) present an exhibition curated by Regina Khidekel. Many Russian émigré artists have invigorated the New York art scene over the past three decades. The '90s was a particularly vibrant decade for integration and the search for relevance in the realm of contemporary art and critical discourse, areas that had been lacking in Russia during the post-Soviet transition. This exhibition aims to revitalize the history of Russian artists in New York during the 1990s and early aughts.